1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data communication over a network and more specifically to an gear mechanism to statistically analyze UDP network loss and latency conditions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Communicating across the public Internet has becoming challenging due to variable nature of composite links. Cellular networks exacerbate the issue with loss due to physical transmission characteristics and congestion from the manifestation of large number of handheld computing devices, such as smartphones and tablets.
Traditional communication relied heavily on Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol (TCP over IP) for guaranteed transmission. In the TCP protocol, every packet transmitted is accounted for and tracked through completion. Since applications have become sensitive to delay and timeouts, TCP/IP has been a difficult network layer to rely on. This is due to the fact that any loss and delay conditions encountered during data transmission causes excessive delays in the effective transaction rate due to wait times of retransmission and reordering of packets prior to usability.
Further, at greater distances, the problems with TCP timing windows become exaggerated. Most applications at large distances suffer from poor user experiences, mostly related to click response. The reason for this is that the ability to react to lost or delayed packets is limited to the knowledge that those packets are lost or delayed. For the packets that are lost or delayed, the reliance on round trip communication to establish the state of the transmission can be compounded by multiple trips.
An alternative protocol, such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP), was preferred for its speed and low overhead in reliable networks due to lack of verification. However, the UDP protocol became less desirable as networks became unreliable and hubs became the primary force of networking gear wherein all ports saw the same broadcast traffic. Although UDP has low overhead, it is difficult to use the protocol on public Internet and cellular networks as random, stochastic loss and congestion create delays, jitter, out-of-order packets and loss.
While there are many applications that require absolute transaction fidelity, there are many other applications where timing and completeness are not high priority. Both discreet and continuous data sets, such as picture transmission, video, audio, etc., can have this relaxed requirement.
There is, therefore, a need for a design that leverages the benefits of the UDP design for the speed and combines it with a good Quality of Service (QoS) management of transmission that leverages some statistical modeling to establish a faster-than-roundtrip response.
It is in this context, embodiments of the invention arise.